


Prv. 20:30

by et_ce_fut_tout



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon Era, Character Study, Gen, I Would Like To Take A Moment To Apologize To The Pope, It's what Victor would have wanted, M/M, Oh God So Much Religious Content, Religious Content, Romani Javert, The Author Has Turned Catholicism Upside Down And Looted It For Useful Parts, We stan historical accuracy in this house
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-26
Updated: 2019-04-12
Packaged: 2019-11-06 02:16:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17930915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/et_ce_fut_tout/pseuds/et_ce_fut_tout
Summary: "Such is the nature of man. It is written into the framework of man’s being, this yearning for the mate of their soul, and it is their ultimate purpose to be joined. So man’s life is spent in a constant chase, reaching for completion. This yearning is so ingrained in man’s soul, in their body, that a soul will feel even the physical pain of their mate’s body, and bear the marks that their mate wears on their flesh."The tale of a righteous man bound to a convict, from youth to death, in an attempt to number the scars of his flesh and his soul.(Or: In a world where soulmates feel each other's physical pain and are marked by each other's wounds and scars, Javert struggles to reconcile his connection to a prisoner of the bagne with his sense of justice and morality.)





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> _Blows and wounds scrub away evil,_  
>  and beatings purge the inmost being.  
> \- Proverbs 20:30 (NIV)
> 
> (Hello and welcome to the first chapter of my in-depth analysis of Inspector Javert's Personal Shitshow™, this time with soulmates and extra despair)
> 
> TW: very brief mention of child abuse in paragraphs eight and ten

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Blows and wounds scrub away evil,  
> and beatings purge the inmost being.  
> \- Proverbs 20:30 (NIV)
> 
> (Hello and welcome to the first chapter of my in-depth analysis of Inspector Javert's Personal Shitshow™, this time with soulmates and extra despair)
> 
> TW: very brief mention of child abuse in paragraphs eight and ten

In the beginning, when the Spirit of the Lord shouted into the dark, formless void of creation, the universe burst with a great crescendo of light and sound. What had once been empty and void was filled, like water spilling over the brim of a bowl. The Lord saw that the light was good, and He set it apart from the darkness. But the light strained against the separation that the Lord had created, for it longed to be complete in its union with the first fruits of creation. And so the universe is in constant strain, as light and dark push against the barrier that the Lord set between them. It is this tension that holds the universe together, and this yearning for completion sent ripples through creation, manifesting over and over again in the very bones of nature. 

This manifestation of severance and gravitation, of pulling apart and coming together, and of that inescapable yearning, influenced even the creation of man. God created man from dust, and formed one being, but on the sixth day, he pulled Eve out of Adam and set her apart, fashioning her into her own being. Two souls, created to be complete in the union of one another, set apart in individual forms, forever drawn together, forever separated by flesh. 

Such is the nature of man. It is written into the framework of man’s being, this yearning for the mate of their soul, and it is their ultimate purpose to be joined. So man’s life is spent in a constant chase, reaching for completion. This yearning is so ingrained in man’s soul, in their body, that a soul will feel even the physical pain of their mate’s body, and bear the marks that their mate wears on their flesh.

__________________

This is _la douleur de l'âme_ : the soul-pain. We know it, because it is felt in the bones of every man, woman, and person inhabiting the space between that lives on God’s Earth. We know it, because we have all felt _la douleur_ , the longing for the mate of our soul, the one for whom we have been created. But we do not know the thin, shivering form of a young Roma boy. We do not know his face streaked with the grime of the gutter, or how he curls into himself as his body rages with the pain of two empty stomachs. This is the tale, or an attempt at the telling, of his soul.

Observe with us, for a moment, Paris in 1785. It is November. The Affair of the Diamond Necklace has engulfed the city in whispers of the queen’s scandal, in the _salons_ of the _bourgeois_ , and the back alleys of the slums. The Second Estate is gorging itself on the Third, fat with gold and jewels. There are black storm clouds gathering around the city, threatening to spill forth the rain of revolution.

It is 1785. The boy, who is called Javert, is in Paris. He knows none of this. Javert, who on account of his dark solemn eyes had been dubbed _Vieillard-Javert_ by the men and women of the street, is wholly occupied by his stomach. He is hungry. He feels this acutely. And he knows, because his mother has told him, that the hunger he feels belongs to himself and some other soul, somewhere. He feels a vague resentment towards the source of this pain he has not earned, this person to whom his soul is bound, but his energies otherwise employed, and his young mind has not the time to consider this peculiar emotion.

This young boy, his dirty face drawn in straight, downward lines by the harsh motion of his mouth, is by necessity an entirely temporal creature. He is of about four or five years of age: even his mother cannot recall, and he does not care to know. He calls himself Javert, because he has known no other name beside it. He begs for a _denier_ , sweeps the step of the baker’s for stale bread, and runs a note from one gentleman to another for a _sol_. He lives from mouthful to mouthful, always searching, never fulfilled.

If his mother slaps him, he does not dodge it. If he falls and scrapes open the skin of his knee, he does not cry. He can connect his own pain to an action, and follow the line of consequence to his suffering. This pain means nothing to him, because it is not greater than the raging pain of his own hunger, and the hunger of the one for whom he was created. Nothing in his mind is higher or more fundamental to his being. _La douleur de l'âme_ is the most central reality of his life.

As a man’s thoughts are drawn prayerfully upward towards God and the holy perfection of Heaven, so are Javert’s thoughts drawn to the constant pain of his soul as his mate suffers alongside him. As for the suffering of the other half of his soul, the soul housed in the body of some other, the body to which his nature dictates he is intrinsically linked, Javert pays no mind to it. He is young, and hungry, and cold in the winter, and altogether occupied with his own present, physical senses.

If there is another, a young man living in Faverolles, of perhaps sixteen years, that is awakened from his sleep with a gasp and a red mark on his cheek when Javert’s mother is displeased, Javert does not know or think to care.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sources/Historical Notes:
> 
> \- (Paragraphs 1-3) Most of this is taken from Genesis 1:1-5, run through the spin cycle of a washing machine and hung out to dry. This bastardization of Catholic/Christian theology is going to be a theme. The link is here: https://www.biblica.com/bible/niv/genesis/1/thesaurus/  
> \- (Paragraph 5) This is my tribute to Victor Hugo's obsession with "setting the scene" with completely irrelevant historical context. Here are my sources: https://www.history.com/topics/france/french-revolution https://www.britannica.com/event/Affair-of-the-Diamond-Necklace  
> \- What I've described of Javert's childhood is either my own fabrication or what I can actually take from Les Miserables.
> 
> Translations
> 
> \- La douleur de l'âme = pain of the soul, soul-pain  
> \- Vieillard-Javert = Old-Man-Javert  
> \- Denier = The smallest unit of French currency before the revolution; essentially a penny. 1/12 of a sol.  
> \- Sol = Another form of French currency, 1/20 of a livre.
> 
> I don't live in or near 18th/19th century France, and while I do come from a Christian background, I don't have much experience with Catholicism. I'm also coming from the perspective of a white upper-middle-class female. I do all the research I can, and try my best to make it as accurate and aware as possible, but I know that there will be times where I get it wrong. I am very committed to the accuracy of this story, and if anyone more experienced or knowledgeable than I wants to provide correction or insight into this story, PLEASE hit me up in the comments (preferably with sources) so I can fix what I need to fix.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Blows and wounds scrub away evil,_  
>  and beatings purge the inmost being.  
> \- Proverbs 20:30 (NIV)
> 
> Fun fact! This was meant to be written and posted two weeks after the prologue. Here we are a month and a half later.
> 
> TW: This is where the "Graphic Depictions of Violence" tag comes in. If that bothers you and you still want to read, start skimming at around paragraph eight ("Whatever explanation...") and come back at the last paragraph.

Javert shot up like weeds caught in the cracks of pavement: fed by pale watery sunlight, dirty city water, and what scant food a young dark-skinned man could earn in Paris. He grew tall and gangling, thin sinewy arms connecting large hands to wide bony shoulders. Skin stretched over muscle; muscle stretched over bone. His brow was drawn close over his eyes, and his mouth was twisted into a scowl, carving hollow caverns into his cheeks. His gaunt body had a particular character of ravenousness, of the angry kind of pain that festers in injustice. Occasionally, the young man’s thin lips would disappear into his mouth, eyes snapped shut like a door slamming over a jail cell, and he would stop moving, shoving down a cry of anguish as it jumped into his throat. _La douleur de l’âme_ was a cruel and unpredictable master.

Javert could not know, could never predict, when or where the soul-pain would strike. Most days, it was the fierce emptiness of his own stomach combined with the hunger of the person that God or Fate or Justice had chosen to bind his body to. The hunger pangs lost their edge in the summer, when - Javert assumed - his other half was able to earn enough to eat. Whatever they did then, it must have been hard labor. Javert often accumulated cuts on his hands during the warmer months, ranging from small nicks and splinters that he wouldn’t notice until he brushed them against something, to large scrapes and gashes that would leap painfully across his flesh in the middle of the street. Once, he had to limp for several streets when his leg unexpectedly gave out in the middle of running a message; he arrived at the address panting, his leg broken.

Javert had an ambiguous understanding of the constant exchange of power as it was handed from king to revolutionary to emperor. He heard the name _Bounaparte_ with the same feeling that he heard the name God or _le Roi Louis_ ; with indifference towards the higher power that he could not touch or alter. And then it was 1796.

Javert knew that he was either fifteen or sixteen, but he told the men that hired him and the landlady of his ragged tenement that he was eighteen. He wore threadbare trousers that were more patch than original material, and the ragged hem hung several inches over his bare ankles. His shirt was white, but it was stained, and it had the pitiful appearance of having been painstakingly cleaned; this only made the stains stand out more clearly against the thin white material. He wore his hair in an old-fashioned queue, tied back severely, exposing the high hard bones of his face. This was Javert when he stepped into the dust-clogged room of the textile factory in June of 1796, the heat and polluted air settling immediately in his throat.

_“Toi, à gauche.”_

Javert inclined his head to the bored wheeze of the foreman and turned in the indicated direction. Looms stood in crooked rows across the room, their spindly structures giving the appearance of hunched skeletal beasts. Behind the looms stood their ragged attendants, mouths and noses swaddled with rags to protect from the air, red-fingered hands pulling and re-threading, backs bent, shirts clinging damply to skin. Javert filled the place behind an idle machine, wrapping his mouth and setting his fingers to work with practiced urgency. He soon fell into rhythm with the rest of the room, the chugging machinery creating a familiar harmony, a heartbeat by which he set the motion of his hands.

_En haut, torsion, en bas, tirer. En haut, torsion, en bas, tirer. En haut, torsion, en bas, tirer._

The sun filtered dimly through the dust. Sweat began to bead on the brows of the workers, marking paths in the dust on their faces. And the sun, from the high windows, marked a path on the floor as the early morning turned into noon. A vague pain built in Javert’s wrists. And the looms cast their shadows on the wall. Javert ignored the pain in his wrists. And on the far wall, the tall skeleton shadow of the looms. The pain in his wrists rubbed raw.

_En haut, torsion, en bas, tirer. En haut, torsion, en bas, tirer. En haut, torsion, en bas, tirer._

The room stank with the sweat of the workers. Javert’s fingers moved the beat of the looms. And cloth flew from the string in his fingers, made of linen and the sweat of his brow. The pain in his wrists grew insistent. And sweat stung at the eyes of the workers. Javert worked through the burning pain in his wrists. And the cloth collected in a spool at his feet. Javert could not recognize the pain as his own.

_En haut, torsion, en bas, tirer. En haut, torsion, en bas, tirer. En haut, torsion,_

“Shit!”

The curse tore from Javert’s lips as pain dug deep into his wrists and lanced through his back. A tremor ran through his body, his fingers jumping from the thread as if it had burned him, and the wheels of the loom spun wildly. Javert stood in mute horror, almost forgetting the pain for a moment as the lenin began to unravel and the string began to snarl. The shout of the foreman reached his ears as if through a fog; he raised his eyes to meet the stout, sweating face above him.

“Monsieur, I - “

The foreman’s broad hand knocked him away from the loom, his face twisted with fury. “Get back from there boy, before any more cloth is lost by thee.”

“I didn’t - ”

Whatever explanation that Javert may have offered was cut off by a choked cry as the same pain sliced through his back once more, more terrible than any pain he had felt before. The image of the foreman swam before him, his rough voice barely breaking through the ringing in Javert’s ears. Making no further attempt to acknowledge the distorted voice of the foreman, Javert turned and ran, stumbling through the crooked forest of chugging looms, past their attendants that stole wide-eyed glances at him as he passed, and barrelling through the doors that opened into the street. He did not stop running. 

As if spurred on by the pain, Javert stumbled and tripped as fast as his feet could carry him. His feet pounded the ground with the same rhythm as the throbbing pain in his back, nearly falling every time a new hot thread of pain was laid across his spine. He could not think or reason. There was only the muscles of his legs and the all-consuming instinct to outrun whatever damned lash was chasing him. And so the chase continued: over sun-blazed streets, turning sharp corners, under the shadows of balconies, pulling through a maze of shouting people. _En haut, torsion, en bas, tirer._ The rhythm of his feet, punctuated by the crack of the lash on his back. The unconscious movement of his body, running and never escaping.

There came a point when Javert’s fear had outrun the capacity of his tortured body. He collapsed in an alley. His breath came in burning gasps, tearing his throat with every inhale. His hair, at some point, had come loose. It hung in damp ringlets over his face, curling over his heaving shoulders. He did not move from the position he had landed in after the collapse of his legs; it seemed as if his body had lost the ability to perform any action besides the shaking of his limbs and the desperate gasping of his lungs. And his back—sweet Mary mother of God, it was his back that set the screaming pain to drag its claws over his skin. Javert felt as if he had been ripped open, his flesh peeled back and set on fire. 

Suddenly unable to bear the weight of the thin material of his shirt, Javert found the strength to scramble at its hem, tearing it from his skin and lifting it over his head with a muffled scream. The edges of his vision blackened as the cloth seemed to turn into sandpaper, scraping his abused flesh with a swift, tearing sensation. The shirt came away bloody. Javert stared at the ruined cloth, at the redness that soaked through the thin folds and onto his hands. His blood—but it was not truly his blood; it was not the product of his own pain. This, he knew, was _la douleur de l’âme._ The phantom lash that had seemed to pursue him from the factory was presently cutting into some other person’s back, drawing the same throbbing lines, drawing the same blood. Blood drying on his skin, his wounds burning and throbbing with every beat of his heart, Javert felt a pain greater than the pain of his body as his mind considered what this meant.

Javert knew two things. The first was that there were three kinds of people on God’s earth that recieved a punishment such as the one he had just endured: slaves, convicts, and those that suffer the misfortune of being their soulmates. The Lord, in his infinite wisdom, had found it necessary to burden Javert with the latter. The second was what truly caused the agony of his mind to eclipse his tortured body: 

This was only the beginning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sources/Historical Notes: 
> 
> \- (Paragraph 3) Javert is sixteen in this chapter, which takes place in the summer of 1796. The previous year, Napolean assumed power in France. The French Revolution has already come and gone: the reign of terror ended when Javert was fourteen. For further context, vist: https://www.marxists.org/history/france/revolution/timeline.htm  
> \- (Paragraph 5) Apart from the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution is also taking hold of Europe. Javert works in a textile factory. I took my information about what that might have looked like from this essay: https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/see/18thCentury.pdf  
> \- (Paragraph 9) The foreman uses the word "thee" to refer to Javert. While this may seem wildly old-fashioned, it's actually a very important nuance to the dialogue that will be occurring in this fic. While English doesn't use formal/informal second-person pronouns, French does. The formal "vous" in French is closest to the English "you", while the informal "tu" is actually closest to the archaic English "thee". In order to indicate whether someone is being referred to informally, I will be using thee/thou. For more information on the nuances of vous and tu, visit: https://www.lawlessfrench.com/grammar/subject-pronouns-tu-vs-vous/
> 
> Translations: 
> 
> \- Toi, à gauche = You, to the left. Note the use of the informal "tu".  
> \- En haut, torsion, en bas, tirer = Up, twist, down, pull. This indicates the motion of Javert's hands as he operates the loom. I have no idea how looms work, and I sunk too much time into researching 18th century textile manufacturing to care.
> 
> I don't live in or near 18th/19th century France, and while I do come from a Christian background, I don't have much experience with Catholicism. I'm also coming from the perspective of a white upper-middle-class female. I do all the research I can, and try my best to make it as accurate and aware as possible, but I know that there will be times where I get it wrong. I am very committed to the accuracy of this story, and if anyone more experienced or knowledgeable than I wants to provide correction or insight into this story, PLEASE hit me up in the comments (preferably with sources) so I can fix what I need to fix.


End file.
